Kevin Killian says I should meet him at the Able Building Maintenance office on Folsom Street, where he's manned the front desk for more than 20 years. I'm reminded of scenes from Good Will Hunting, focusing on the genius kid working a menial janitor's job, played by Matt Damon, except Killian should be playing the Robin Williams role of the brainy psychiatrist who reaches out to the kid and gets burned. As one of the legends of the San Francisco queer literary world, a key progenitor of the post-Beat, New Narrative movement in the 1980s, Killian ought to have a big mahogany desk in a ritzy penthouse apartment or some exclusive literary club. He should be dressed in a lavender-trim smoking jacket, leaning back in a huge leather chair, eyeing me with just a sniff of wariness and condescension. Instead here he is, a middle-aged front-desk person, agreeable, deferential, not the lion king at all. But he's my hero nonetheless, because he helped shape a literary movement as vibrant as the Beats, and he's still here to talk about it and carry its legacy to a new generation.
We share a common passion: a New Narrative writer by the name of Sam D'Allesandro, who bloomed gloriously and died much too soon in the 1980s, his work now neglected except by a small, fiercely devoted cadre of aging literary folks, most notably Killian, his longtime partner Dodie Bellamy, and the dean of the New Narrative movement, Robert Gluck, whose "Sex Story" is still the hottest piece of turn-on literature I've encountered, with the possible exception of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye . The late poet/fiction writer/editor Steve Abbott, a friend to me and many budding writers, also knew Sam and spurred on his career.
I love what Killian writes about their relationship in the introduction to The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro, edited by Killian and hot off the press from Suspect Thoughts Press (an expansion on The Zombie Pit, a D'Allesandro anthology edited by Abbott and published by The Crossing Press in 1989, after Sam's death, and now long out of print): "We took Sam to our hearts, and learned of his potential quick, thanks to the untiring efforts of the late Steve Abbott, who was the real live wire, who always knew which way the wind was blowing. Immediately Sam took up the pose of a besieged Nijinsky fending off the imperious advances of Diaghilev. (Steve, Sam told us, wanted to spank his ass with a slab of bacon.)"
I laugh my ass off reading the sentence, it's so Steve! Yet he was a gentle soul, perfectly harmless, except as a poet, and then among the fiercest — like Killian, who is my Ginsberg. Killian's debut novel Shy details the lives of a happily corrupt, streetwise kid in New York City and all the characters he fucks with, including Killian, in the sexually charged queer 1970s milieu. No doubt the power of that writing is what attracted Sam to Killian. Sam did just as masterful a job getting into the soul of his often lost, dissolute characters.
The New Narrative writers were all about transgression, sublimating the ego, breaking out of patterns, letting themselves be pulled into the story. They treated vulnerability as a virtue on par with truth, justice, and being queer outlaws. They practiced painstaking introspection. You knew every inflection of their various neuroses, along with their microscopically examined sexual tics.
Gluck's "Sex Story" (from Elements of a Coffee Service) ignited the movement and drew the literary world's attention, but to broaden their fan base, the New Narrativistas needed a real live sex symbol, and they found it in Sam. Killian, Abbot, Bellamy, Gluck and others played big roles in bringing Sam's work to life in the first place, and the survivivors have carried his torch ever since.
Killian worked intimately with Sam on joint writing projects, literally and literarily touched Sam, who melted countless queer hearts at readings. Sam had the red-hot sexiness of Matt Dillon in Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, films of Sam's era. And Sam was a good writer to boot. How could any queer poetry/prose lover not lust after him?
Sinfully good
By luck, my boyfriend and I became neighbors of Sam and his longtime partner Fritz Schultz on Hugo Street. I went weak-kneed every time Sam and I stood at the same N-Judah stop together. I thought his first book of poems, Slippery Sins, was the shit, I mean the shit. Sam's poems read like prose. In fact, I see clearly now that Sam's poems were prose, mostly. In editing The Wild Creatures, Killian took the line breaks out of some of the Slippery Sins poems, revealing them to be prose in disguise. Still, someday I'd love to see a reproduction of the original Slippery Sins, a lovely, imperfect gem that deserves to be displayed.
Living near Sam and Fritz gave me access to my idol, but meanwhile Sam was busy seeking access to his own superheroes. "Part of him wanted to be famous," Killian writes, "so he could get to meet and know as equals his idols Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Jean Genet, Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Laura Nyro, Willem de Kooning, Dory Previn, David Bowie, Nina Simone, William Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Kathy Acker, Brian Eno, Leonard Cohen. Did he ever meet any of them? I don't believe he did, but such was his tact that I don't really know."
Hell, Sam even made up his name, based on Warhol icon Joe D'Allesandro. Sam would claim to be Joe's son. When the real Joe found out, Sam had to stop claiming a kinship. His real name was Richard Anderson — that is, before he became the real Sam D'Allesandro. The persona he created is the persona that stuck.
As to Sam's star lust, Killian adds, appropriately: "But anyway, he did get to meet us, the prose writers of San Francisco who were busy working on a New Narrative, a community-based project in which we hoped to recuperate narrative from the trap of modernism by rearticulating it as a postmodern conceptual art, wise to the precepts of Language poetry." Sam lucked out after all.
But back to lunch with my literary date. Killian and I end up having a talk about old times, even though we ran in different circles in those days, and I had no idea then that Sam knew Killian or vice versa. Now it's like Killian and I are old friends who love literature, discussing the sexy young literary thing they both read and lusted after long ago. Sam died at age 31 in 1988, of AIDS, though, as Killian notes, you'd hardly know he had the disease from his writing. Killian says Sam wrote the word AIDS maybe once during his dying days, in his long correspondence with Bellamy. One of the most moving bits in the new D'Allesandro anthology is a letter to Killian from Sam, the dying writer's confession:
"No one will say so, but I'm terminal. I don't care about politics or the old lovers I'd wanted to see on my deathbed. I've forgotten the meaning of everything except my medication. Buried beneath layers of thin tissue, a refugee on a field of darkness, I am isolated, confused, as white noise fills my ears. Only the world inside my imploding body is real, like watching on film as I disintegrate."
Another kind of noise filled my ears —the sunrise rosy, exquisite, full-bodied, legs/arms/torso-entwined, lip-smacking sound of two poets having sex on a living room floor. I don't remember whose floor — Killian told me, I'm sure, but in the rush of the realization that Killian actually had sex one time with Sam, I could have become a fainting Southern belle. Even all these years later, the thought of such an encounter turns me on, so right there and then in the restaurant I had to reach across the table to touch the arm of this man who had actually been naked, flesh-on-flesh, with Sam.
Sam, you devil you, you're just as exciting as ever!
Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy and Robert Gluck will read at a book release party for The Wild Creatures at City Lights Booksellers, 261 Columbus Ave., 7 p.m. on Tuesday, October 4. Info: 415-362-8193; www.citylights.com